BERNARD HERRMANN: THE MAN AND THE MUSICIAN

‘Temperamental, isn’t he?’ So mused studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck after Bernard Herrmann had stormed angrily out of the room when Zanuck had the temerity to make a suggestion about his score for the film Five Fingers (1952). Stories of Herrmann’s eruptions have become part of movie folk-lore. Apparently director William Friedkin, wanting Herrmann to score The Exorcist (1973), flattered him by remarking, ‘I’d like a score as great as your music for Citizen Kane,’ t o which Herrmann exploded, ‘Well, then, make me a film as great as Citizen Kane!’ and promptly left the production. Orchestral musicians had similar experiences. When one player complained he could not follow Herrmann’s pencilled BERNARD HERRMANN (1911 - 1975) alterations to his score, Herrmann growled: ‘What do you want – neon lights?’

1. ECHOES (1965) for String Quartet [19.04] The gruffness concealed a tender heart, as the chamber works on this recording testify: as Aaron Copland would say, ‘If it’s in the music, it’s in the man.’ What SOUVENIRS DE VOYAGE (1967) for Clarinet Quintet could never be concealed was the wide-ranging talent. As a film composer 2. First Movement: Lento (Molto Tranquillo) - Allegro Moderato [12.46] he had no peer. As a composer for the concert hall, his works were performed - Lento (Molto Tranquillo) - Adagio by the likes of Beecham, Stokowski and Ormandy. As a conductor he was 3. Second Movement: Andante (Berceuse) [7.08] extraordinarily eclectic, championing Charles Ives’s work, for example, long 4. Third Movement: Andantino (Canto amoroso) [8.06] before it became fashionable and having a particular penchant for the music of English composers such as Delius and Richard Arnell, whose piano concerto 5. PSYCHO SUITE for String Quartet he commissioned when Head of Music at CBS (A new recording by the Tippett Transcribed and Arranged by Richard Birchall [9.53] Quartet of Arnell’s String Quartets is to be issued later this year). As evidence of the esteem in which he was held, there is the occasion in 1946 when he Total timings: [56.59] asked Stravinsky to autograph his copy of the score of Stravinsky’s Symphony in 3 Movements. The inscription read: ‘To the excellent musician and conductor, TIPPETT QUARTET Bernard Herrmann. Cordially, I. Stravinsky.’ That must have seemed like a JULIAN BLISS clarinet reference from God: I doubt whether Stravinsky would have done that for Herbert von Karajan.

2 3 Yet Herrmann’s versatility became the source of much inner conflict, for it complicated Not only was Citizen Kane (1941) a movie masterpiece, it was also a musical his career path. Should he be concentrating on his real love, conducting? (His milestone, Herrmann delivering a score as innovative as the film itself. Rejecting ambition was always to be chief conductor of a great orchestra: he never quite the Romanticism of Viennese-born composers like Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang forgave André Previn for landing that post with the LSO.) Should he be composing Korngold that had dominated Hollywood for a decade, Herrmann, among other for the concert hall? Whilst still comparatively young, he already had completed things, revolutionised the studio orchestra; downplayed melody in favour of small an ambitious First Symphony (1941) and a cantata Moby Dick (1938), premiered musical cells and motifs; and, in Howard Goodall’s phrase, ‘replaced sentiment by the New York Philharmonic under John Barbirolli, who became a close friend. with anxiety’. Winning an Oscar for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1942), he Or should he devote himself to the cinema, which was more lucrative but less found himself much in demand, particularly for subjects of a Gothic or darkly prestigious? Yet the cinema was the medium which ideally suited his talents and psychoanalytical nature. His music for Hanover Square (1945) prompted a fan he was to give film music a new stature. Something of this conflict is suggested letter from a 15-year-old Stephen Sondheim. His score for Jane Eyre (1943) in the three items on this recording. The Suite from Psycho (1960) celebrates stimulated a love of the Brontes which was to lead to his only opera, Wuthering what the critic Edward Seckerson has described with some justification as ‘the Heights, completed in 1951. At this stage Herrmann was still torn between his most imaginative film score ever written’, and the two chamber pieces come from conducting and composing ambitions and writing for the movies, but in the mid a period later in the decade when Herrmann’s film career seemed to be in decline 1950s, an unmistakeable profile was looming on the horizon whose films inspired and he would need to look to alternative modes of composition. Herrmann to a new level of creativity: Alfred Hitchcock. Their collaboration on nine suspense films between 1955 and 1966 was a composer-director relationship Herrmann was born into a middle-class Jewish family in New York on 29 June, 1911. unmatched in film history for imagination and cinematic symbiosis. It touched its His family was not particularly musical, though he liked telling the story of his father peak in three consecutive masterpieces of film direction and scoring: the romantic who, when going to the opera, would always book two seats: one for himself and tragedy, Vertigo (1958), the supreme comedy-thriller North by Northwest (1959) one for his hat and coat. Herrmann’s musical talent became apparent when he won and the horror classic Psycho (1960). a $100 dollar prize for symphonic composition whilst still at high school. He attended the Juilliard Graduate School and then New York University, where one of his ‘I wanted the sound of pure ice-water,’ Herrmann said later of his use of an all- composition teachers was the indefatigably iconoclastic Percy Grainger. By the age string orchestra for Psycho. Who would have thought the sound of violins could of 20, Herrmann had founded his own chamber orchestra; and in 1934 he landed a be so terrifying? Hitchcock had originally not wanted music for the shower murder job at CBS Radio, rapidly becoming their chief staff conductor. This brought him into scene but had to concede Herrmann’s music added a stunning extra dimension. contact with the new boy-wonder of radio, Orson Welles. After Welles’s notorious The shrieking strings intensify the victim’s screams, whilst the stabbing rhythms 1938 broadcast War of the Worlds had panicked half of America and made him a accentuate the ferocity of the knife attack. Earlier the frenzied string sounds celebrity overnight, RKO Studios in Hollywood beckoned with a tempting contract to accompanying Janet Leigh’s journey to the Bates motel have transformed a rain- make his first film. Welles accepted, taking a team of his most trusted collaborators swept car-drive into a scene of paranoid pursuit, a character in flight from inner with him, including Herrmann. It was a move that changed Herrmann’s life. demons. ‘The music is telling us that something terrible is going to happen to her,’

4 5 Herrmann said, ‘it’s got to.’ Interestingly, the three-note ‘Madness’ motif at the end, The Clarinet Quintet, ‘Souvenirs de Voyage’ was written in January 1967. As as Bates sits in insane isolation in his cell, derives from one of Herrmann’s earliest with a number of Herrmann’s concert works, it had literary connections. The first orchestral compositions, Sinfonietta for Strings (1935), influenced by the serialism movement was inspired by A.E. Housman’s poem ‘On Wenlock Edge’ and the of Schoenberg. It will return at the conclusion of his last film score, Taxi Driver (1976) second by J.M. Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’ – both works that had previously as a musical clue to the hero’s continuing psychosis. For this studio recording, inspired music from one of Herrmann’s great composer heroes, Ralph Vaughan a Suite from ‘Psycho’ has been transcribed and arranged by Richard Birchall Williams. The music of the opening movement reflects Housman’s descriptions and double tracked. of pastoral tranquillity alternating with fierce winds. In the second movement, to quote Steven C. Smith in his fine biography of Herrmann, A Heart at Fire’s Centre, Hitchcock and Herrmann were to have a dramatic falling out over the music for ‘one can envision an autumnal sunset off the Irish west coast, Herrmann’s swaying Torn Curtain (1966), an abrasive unorthodox score when Hitchcock had insisted dream-like rhythm for strings and sighing clarinet appoggiaturas rising like wave on something popular and appealing. (Feeling his score improved the film, crests against their foundation.’ The finale was suggested by Turner’s Venetian Herrmann had grumbled: ‘You want a doctor to make you well – you don’t also water-colours. It features a love theme for violins and clarinet calls representing expect him to make you rich.’) Trends in film scoring were moving away from his nature’s enticements before a serene twilit coda. The happier air of this mellifluous individualistic style to a preference for melodies that were commercially exploitable. piece was no doubt influenced by Herrmann’s meeting of a young BBC Perhaps in reaction to this trend, he wrote his first concert work for 14 years, the researcher, Norma Shepherd who became his third wife in November 1967. String Quartet ‘Echoes’, which he described as ‘a series of nostalgic emotional remembrances.’ A beautiful, brooding opening theme establishes a melancholy tone Herrmann died in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, 1975 after completing the final (it might not be coincidental that Herrmann was going through a second painful recording session for Taxi Driver. In his last years, he had settled in England and divorce during the work’s composition) and it will recur as an interlude before each was seeing his stock dramatically rising again through new recordings and the part of the score, binding together the flickering changes of mood and style. It is a eager attention of a younger generation of Hollywood directors such as Brian deeply personal work: there are echoes of his own music and personality that could De Palma (for whom he scored Sisters and Obsession) and Martin Scorsese, who have come from no-one else. A sad waltz echoes the ‘Memory Waltz’ from Snows dedicated Taxi Driver to his memory. The distinguished musicologist Christopher of Kilimanjaro (1953); a habanera rhythm fleetingly recalls the music for James Palmer said of his friend: ‘I never once knew him to lecture or talk at me nor to Stewart’s obsessed spying on Kim Novak in the art gallery scene in Vertigo; a discuss music in technical terms … For him, life and music were entirely a matter macabre scherzo is like those ‘rides in hell’ at which Herrmann excelled in numerous of emotional response.’ Music and movie lovers unite in their gratitude and respect films, just as the Allegro momentarily has something of the violence of Psycho. The for a musician of uncompromising integrity and a composer with that rare gift of work was premiered in December 1966 and also accompanied a 1971 Royal Ballet being able to touch the heart and get under your skin. performance for two dancers called ‘Ante-Room’. There are few more haunting and accessible works in the modern string quartet repertory. Neil Sinyard

6 7 Being conducted by a composer in a powder blue suit and bright yellow trainers certainly creates an impression. Sir Michael Tippett died in 1998 and was such an inspirational musician that when the Tippett Quartet was formed in the same week, they decided to take his name. The Tippett Quartet is one of Britain’s leading string quartets, committed to combining mainstream repertoire with contemporary works, and have been described as “bold and innovative…extraordinary technical accomplishment with flair and a bright communicative spark” (The Times). Their interpretations are stylistically varied, informed by the breadth of their repertoire and it is their clarity of execution and total commitment in their performances that has led to collaborations with artists such as Lawrence Power, David Owen Norris, Melvyn Tan, Ashley Wass and Craig Ogden. The quartet has premiered works by composers including John Adams, Cecilia Ore, Simon Holt, Robert Walker, Howard Goodall and Stephen Dodgson. The quartet’s impressive and diverse catalogue of recordings have not only topped the classical charts but also entered the pop charts. The Tippett Quartet was formed in 1998, the year in which they made their Wigmore Hall debut. They have since performed at the BBC Proms, Cheltenham Festival, Three Choirs Festival, Chichester Festivities, Dartington International Summer School, Presteigne Festival and the Lincoln and Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival. They have also performed at Kings Place, Purcell Room, TIPPETT QUARTET Queen Elizabeth Hall, Bridgewater Hall, The Sage, Gateshead and regularly John Mills violin return to Wigmore Hall. The quartet frequently appears on BBC Radio 3 and Jeremy Isaac violin has broadcast live performances on Radio Novi Sad, Serbia and Sveriges Radio Julia O’Riordan viola (Swedish National Radio). Bozidar Vukotic cello www.tippettquartet.co.uk

8 9 JULIAN BLISS Channel 4 entitled ‘Gifted’, and he was among the distinguished artists invited to perform at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Celebrations at Buckingham Palace Firmly established on the international concert scene on 1 June 2002. Julian Bliss has already appeared as soloist with a number of important orchestras including the London In 2007 Julian was invited by Conn Selmer to design a range of affordable Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, clarinets bearing his name. The BLISS range of clarinets was recently launched Orchestre National de France, City of Birmingham world-wide and have received much praise. For more information about Julian Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, BBC and the BLISS clarinets visit www.Julianbliss.com. Philharmonic, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, NHK Symphony, Munich Chamber, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic, Swedish Tracks 1-4 recorded at St. Paul’s Church, Southgate, 10 and 28 June 2010. Radio Symphony, and the Bergen Philharmonic. Track 5 recorded at Kore Studios, London, 5 October 2010. In recital Julian has appeared at such prestigious Producer & Engineer – Michael Ponder venues as the Wigmore Hall, Cadogan Hall, the Editor – Jennifer Howells Louvre in Paris, Montpellier Festival, Jerusalem Music Booklet design – Darren Rumney Festival, Bad Kissingen, Rheingau and Mecklenburg By kind permission of The Bernard Herrmann Estate Festivals, where he was awarded the audience prize and is now a regular guest. www.thebernardherrmannestate.com He recently gave a very successful debut recital at the Lincoln Center in New York. As a prolific chamber musician, Julian has collaborated with artists such as Joshua The Tippett Quartet would like to thank: Neil Sinyard, Norma Herrmann & The Bell, Steven Isserlis, Misha Maisky, Steven Kovacevich, Elena Bashkirova, Julian Bernard Herrmann Estate, Richard Birchall, Thomas Wright & Ikon Arts Management Rachlin, Simon Trpceski and Helen Grimaud. P 2011 The copyright in this recording is owned by Signum Records Ltd. Julian’s recordings for EMI have been greeted with critical acclaim and of his most C 2011 The copyright in this CD booklet, notes and design is owned by Signum Records Ltd. recent release with Sabine Meyer as recording partner was said “Spohr Clarinet Any unauthorised broadcasting, public performance, copying or re-recording of Signum Compact Discs constitutes an infringement Concerto no.2 in C minor, colourfully played by Julian Bliss, is full of instrumental of copyright and will render the infringer liable to an action by law. Licences for public performances or broadcasting may be obtained invention, pitting the clarinet against some highly original effects and so requiring from Phonographic Performance Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this booklet may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission much care in balance as well as finger dexterity.” (Gramophone) from Signum Records Ltd. Julian has appeared on national television on numerous occasions; at the Queen’s SignumClassics, Signum Records Ltd, Suite 14, 21 Wadsworth Road, Perivale, Middx UB6 7JD, UK. 80th Birthday at the BBC Proms in front of a live audience and a television audience +44 (0) 20 8997 4000 E-mail: [email protected] around the world in forty countries, in a three-part documentary about his life for www.signumrecords.com

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